Why Does God Hate Figs So Much?
From 1999 to 2005, I ran a website called godhatesfigs.com. I realized that I've never talked about it in my newsletter, so here's the whole story. (Warning: this article contains references to homophobia and religious bigotry.)
Back in the late 1990s, when I was first acknowledging my voluminous queerness, I stumbled across a horrifying website called godhatesfags.com. This was the product of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, which used to show up and protest queer events. I found that website simultaneously ridiculous -- it was really campy! -- and disturbing in its naked embrace of hate. I started to noodle about a way to respond to it.
Then, in 1999, I was at an event called Webzine: a celebration of weird and wacky internet publications of all kinds. I remember being in the audience for presentations by some of the earliest bloggers, as well as the webmaster of a site that hosted nothing but photos of naked Germans parachuting. I got to hear a conversation with Jennifer Ringley, the creator of JenniCam, which is just what it sounded like: she had a webcam that was always on, documenting her entire life, and she got her share of weird stalkers. This was the Internet before it became as mainstream and sanitized as it is now, a place where people could overshare and post bizarre art, and you could just stumble upon endless wackiness through webrings or whatnot.
At some point during Webzine 1999, there was a moment for people to get up and talk about websites they were working on. On an impulse, I got up and said that I was going to create a site called godhatesfigs, as a parody of that other site. People seemed to like the idea, and my friend Marcy offered me free web hosting.
The earliest version of godhatesfigs.com was pretty crude: just an assortment of random jokes and goofiness. I slowly honed it into something that poked fun in a more purposeful fashion at the absurdity of cherry-picking religious texts to spread negativity about a group of people who were just trying to live their lives. Not to mention bigots complaining that they're oppressed because people don't like their bigotry. I'm a tad embarrassed by how long it took for me to realize that the Bible has some choice passages about figs, including one where Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. And another one, that refers to figs that are "so bad they cannot be eaten."
As I've written about before, I'm not a religious person, but I do have an abiding love of religion, and some of my favorite people have been believers. In creating this site, I was inspired by a magazine called The Wittenburg Door, a side-splitting Christian humor magazine which I subscribed to for years. Every issue had a piece of Bible exegesis written by Joe Bob Briggs, who used to host B-movies on late night TV. So I wasn't trying to be anti-religion, but rather to help people see that religion didn't deserve to be dragged into people's random vendettas.
Godhatesfigs has been down for over a decade, since I lost the URL, but you can still view the site on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Looking back, some of the jokes on the site haven't aged well, while a lot of others are either ham-fisted or too on the nose. But I still like the absurdism at the heart of it, and some of the material holds up pretty well. From the FAQ page on the site:
If God made figs, why does He hate them?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably had one of those ugly T-shirts when you were a kid that showed a little boy saying "God don't make no trash." Which is complete nonsense, if you stop to think about it for two seconds. I mean, go to any landfill, and what do you see? God's handiwork, for the most part. Theologians estimate that approximately 62 percent of all waste materials are God-made. Another 30 percent are man-made, and 8 percent are woman-made. ...
I think it's something like the impulse to stare at a horrific accident. Or one of those reality shows about when animals attack cops. You deplore what's happening, but you just have to keep watching. I once got hooked on Saved By the Bell, a show I hate. I had to tune in every week just to sit and bellow obscenities at the screen. I never missed it, even though my hatred deepened with each exposure. That's the way God is. He keeps creating these things, even though He really can't stand them. It's like scratching an itch that you know scratching is just going to make worse.
You get the flavor. Eventually, I got more ambitious. Among other things, my friend Amy helped to make some religious tracts, in the style of the infamous Jack Chick, warning against the evils of figs. I posted them on the site as PDFs, so people could print them out and assemble them themselves.
Because this was the olden times, a tiny indie website mostly run by one person could become popular, and that's what happened. The London Times gave us a shout out. Godhatesfigs was a Yahoo! Cool Site of the Day, which was a huge deal back then. Our sitemeter (you don't need to know what that is) showed our traffic numbers soaring up and up. I got emails every day, at my Godhatesfigs.com email address, from people with questions.
Mostly, people asked, "Is this site for real?"
To which I always responded, "Try hitting 'refresh' or 'reload' on your browser. If it loads a second time, it's definitely for real."
I also received emails from people who told me they had been scared and upset, and the site had helped them a little bit.
Satire and culture-jamming don't always work against fascism and extreme hate. Sometimes they simply feed into the fascists' feeling of victimization, allowing them to whine that elites are mocking them. Other times, it's hard to be any more ridiculous and extreme than the actual fascists, which makes the satire appear somewhat pointless. But I feel like something like Godhatesfags — which was so hateful that hate was right there in the name! — was trying to freak people out and make them feel helpless, and gently mocking it and pointing out the absurdity of its misappropriation of religion could actually help to take some of the sting away. I can't promise that I ever changed a bigot's mind with this site, but I'm pretty sure that people who were scared of bigots felt a little better after visiting, at least.
I know that people made God Hates Figs signs for a variety of counter protests to anti-gay hate groups. (I honestly have no clue if these folks were inspired by my website, or if they came up with the same idea independently.)
A guy I knew also ran a similar site, called God Hates Shrimp, pointing out that the haters' favorite anti-gay passages in Leviticus also prohibit the eating of shellfish.
By the mid 2000s, the Westboro Baptist Church had become somewhat less influential as a force for anti-gay bigotry. The church had decided that the United States as a whole was decadent and needed to be brought down, and they created a new website called God Hates America, which is apparently preserved by the Library of Congress. Their members went from organizing anti-gay protests to picketing the funerals of U.S. service people who had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it goes.
Movies I Love Right Now
I really enjoyed The Marvels — it's one of the best superhero movies I've seen in years, not to mention one of the most inventive. Director Nia DaCosta serves up action that doesn't feel like anything I'd seen before. All three leads deliver strong performances, and they have great chemistry together, and the film has a lot of heart. Mostly, it's just goofy, silly fun, while not being an outright comedy in the vein of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or the last two Thor movies. Was it a perfect film? Definitely not, but it was highly entertaining and I cared about the characters. I'm sad that more people aren't giving this movie a chance in theaters.
And I'm just going to point out the obvious: the folks who decided to skip The Marvels had no clue whether it was any good, because they hadn't seen it. (And advance ticket sales were weak long before any reviews had been published.) It's way more likely that this film suffered from the same fatigue that tanked Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, not to mention some recent DC films. Anyway, you still have a chance to see The Marvels in theaters, and I highly recommend checking it out on the big screen.
Meanwhile, I was poking around on Hulu and I found a movie I had never heard of called Quiz Lady. Awkwafina plays an uptight quiz-show-obsessed nerd, and Sandra Oh plays her irresponsible party-girl older sister. Honestly, if you're as devoted a Sandra Oh fan as I am, that should be all the information you need. She is clearly having the time of her life playing a ditzy, impractical weirdo who always has the most bonkers solution for every problem. But also, Quiz Lady is side-splitting funny while still respecting its characters. I fucking adored this film and it's free on Hulu, so definitely give it a spin.
Music I Love Right Now
I'm guessing I'm not the only person who got into Joni Mitchell because Prince gave her a shout out in one of his songs and talked about her endlessly in interviews. I listened to Blue and Court and Spark more times than I can count — so I've been really enjoying the new compilation Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 3: The Asylum Years, which goes in depth on that era of her career. There are fucktonnes of live versions and demos, and you can see how she went from doing all of her concerts solo to performing with a band, the L.A. Express. [Side note: how did I not know until now that Joe Sample is all over Court and Spark? That dude had a much bigger impact on the music I like than I ever realized.]
My Stuff
I've been the Washington Post's regular science fiction and fantasy book review columnist for the past year or so. It's a dream gig, not least because I get to read tons of new SFF and shout about it. I have discovered so many new favorite authors. Anyway, they just published my list of the ten best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023 (paywall-free link) and I cannot recommend these books too highly. We are fucking blessed to have such riches! Also, the Post came up with a wonderful illustration for the column, and I keep staring at it.
This coming Saturday! The Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl is coming back! It's just what it sounds like: we get some peeps together to walk around a neighborhood visiting bookstores, and we eat chocolate between stores. Our first post-COVID event is this Saturday Nov. 18 at 1 PM on Valencia Street, and details are here.
For the next few days, you can get Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the third book in my young adult space fantasy trilogy, for just $2.99 in ebook form. (Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Voopfish, GnopGnop, all the formats.)
